Site Mobile Navigation

Suddenly That Summer, Out of the Closet

THE conventional wisdom about Tennessee Williams, especially among politically correct detractors and gay-liberation activists, is that he was a self-loathing gay man. His homosexual characters are cloaked in heterosexual disguise, the argument goes, and so their humanity is distorted.

Now a premiere of a once-lost work, “The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer,” provides more evidence that Williams wrote freely about his sexual desires. Completed when he was 29, the play details his own emotional crisis after being dumped (for a woman) by the first great male love of his life, a young Canadian draft dodger named Kip Kiernan. The play, staged by the Minneapolis company Shakespeare on the Cape, will make its debut as part of a new Tennessee Williams festival in Provincetown, Mass., where Williams wrote early drafts of the plays that made him famous: “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Summer and Smoke” and “The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.”

One reason Provincetown decided to stage a Tennessee Williams festival after all these years was to wrest the playwright out of the ghetto of Southern writers by focusing on his life in Cape Cod. “There is a lot of nonsense that says Williams was conflicted about his homosexuality in this period of his life,” said David Kaplan, a theater director and founder of the four-day festival that begins Thursday. “That’s not true.” He added: “The tone of ‘Parade’ is beautifully unequivocal. It is not whining. It is not apologetic. He demands his audience to take seriously gay people onstage.”

Thomas Keith, an editor at New Directions, which publishes Williams’s works, agrees. “Williams was writing about his own life in a less disguised way at a time when he probably didn’t expect that he would show his work to his agent,” Mr. Keith said. “It was a story that he wanted to tell, and he came back to it in the 1960’s.”

The 45-minute version of “The Parade” produced in Provincetown is William’s final draft, completed in 1962. In 1940 Williams was mending the wounds of his broken heart when he handwrote in his notebooks a hastily unfinished draft. Composed in July and August of that year, “The Parade” is a document of what he later called that “pivotal summer when I took sort of a crash course in growing up,” a chronicle of how he “had finally come thoroughly out of the closet.”

Perhaps for the only time in his life Williams unguardedly fell in love. For less than six weeks that summer he and the 22-year-old Mr. Kiernan, whom the playwright thought resembled the Russian dancer Vasla Nijinsky, shared a two-story shack on Captain Jack’s Wharf. As Williams writes in his “Memoirs’’: “We slept together each night on the double bed up there, and so incontinent was my desire for the boy that I would wake him repeatedly during the night for more love-making. You see, I had no sense in those days — and nights — of how passion can wear out even a passive partner.”

One day Mr. Kiernan’s girlfriend entered the picture. Mr. Kiernan told Williams that their affair was over. “I was in a state of shock,” he wrote. Distraught, Williams packed his bags for Mexico. Mr. Kiernan later married but at 26 died of a brain tumor in a New York City hospital.

Photo

Tennessee Williams in Provincetown in the 1940s, not long after his affair with a draft dodger.Credit
Courtesy of Joe Hazan

In “The Parade” Williams’s alter ego, Don, pines hopelessly after a muscular young dancer, Dick, who is blithely in love with a woman named Wanda. Meanwhile Don himself is pursued by a woman, Miriam (who was based on a New Yorker named Ethel Elkovsky who loved Williams). Turning down Miriam, Don says love is like a circus parade that “has never come.” He adds: “My neck’s getting stiff from straining forward. I’m beginning to think the parade isn’t going to stop by. It must have been halted somewhere. The elephants turned hugely, impassively aside at the wrong intersection.”

Mr. Kaplan said, “Williams has compassion for Miriam,” comparing the predicament of the play’s lovelorn characters to those in “The Seagull” by Chekhov. “Don understands that her love for him is just as sad and funny as his love for this straight guy. He shows his pride and unequivocal humanity about being gay.”

When the affair with Mr. Kiernan ended badly in 1940, Williams felt angry and vulnerable. He ripped out the handwritten pages of “Parade” from his lined notebook and set them aside. Those notes would later turn up 22 years later. Andreas Brown, today the owner of Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan, was working in 1962 with Williams’s agent Audrey Wood, tracking down his unpublished works for a bibliography. It was then that Joe Hazan, Williams’s Provincetown friend and confidant, revealed that he had rescued the missing pages. Mr. Brown typed them and showed them to Williams, who fine-tuned the script and completed it.

Mr. Keith credits Mr. Kaplan for identifying the final 1962 version of “The Parade” and distinguishing it from Williams’s copious earlier drafts.

The 1962 “Parade,” Mr. Kaplan said, is a mature revision that shows off the playwright’s mastery. Williams had, by then, become a famous writer and had a long-term relationship. “The Night of the Iguana” was heading toward a Broadway run of 316 performances. His picture was on the cover of Time magazine. “Williams clearly devoted a certain amount of skill and attention to ‘The Parade,’ ” Mr. Kaplan said. “He takes the time to polish and finish it off. And for what end? The revised script is taken almost page for page, word for word, from the 1940 draft. What he mostly did in 1962 was to put a frame on it at the beginning and at the end. He strengthened the Chekhovian nature of the script and the classical unities.”

“The Parade” is the latest among a string of previously unknown early Williams plays that have been rescued from the voluminous archives he left behind. Over the last 10 years or so five full-length plays (pre-“Glass Menagerie”) and a volume of one-acts have resurfaced, the most famous of which is “Not About Nightingales.” This 1938 prison drama had its premiere in 1998 at the Royal National Theater in London and was a resounding success a year later on Broadway. The National Theater is considering a new production of Williams’s “Candles to the Sun,” a 1937 social-protest drama about Alabama coal miners, published for the first time in 2004. Last year New Directions published “Mister Paradise and Other One-Act Plays,” a gathering of 13 previously unpublished Williams one-acts, most written in the 1930’s and 1940’s.

“ ‘Not About Nightingales’ got everyone past the assumption that you could only find grade B or C Williams in the archives,” Mr. Keith said.

Rightly or wrongly, Williams’s early works have been labeled as “apprentice plays.” Scholars say there might be some 142 unpublished plays, though that number is anything but definitive. For Williams neatness did not count.

“For almost every full-length Williams,” Mr. Keith said, “you can find a shorter version, a one-act that stands alone, a short story and sometimes even a poem. He wrote and rewrote like crazy. He didn’t number his pages. He left papers all over the place. The material is to there to be had if you have the time, patience and knowledge to go through them.”

Williams’s 1981 play “Something Cloudy, Something Clear,’’ his longer and complexly woven reminiscence about Provincetown, covers some of the same ground as “The Parade.” But Williams, who died two years later, was an altogether different creature by that time. “The difference is that he had been repeatedly mocked in public — not to mention his own disruptive behavior,” Mr. Kaplan said. “It’s not that he was bitter in his later life, but he didn’t have that confidence of a successful playwright, which is what he was in 1962.”

For instance Williams’s 1975 “Memoirs,” which New Directions is reissuing next month with a new foreword by the filmmaker John Waters, was initially greeted with critical derision and caused a scandal. “If Williams,” one critic wrote, “has not exactly opened his heart, he has opened his fly.”

Mr. Keith said: “The book needs a reconsideration. If a straight person had been that candid about his love life, he wouldn’t have been treated the same way.”

Mr. Kaplan, whose book, “Tennessee Williams in Provincetown,” is also coming out next month, from Hansen Publishing Group, said he suspects “The Parade” wasn’t produced during Williams’s lifetime because of the antigay climate. Mr. Kaplan compares the Provincetown premiere of “The Parade” to the posthumous publication of E. M. Forster’s novel “Maurice” and to Paul Cadmus’s openly homoerotic paintings. “These are different people who wanted to go after the mainstream and withheld certain aspects of themselves in the art they created for mass production,” Mr. Kaplan said. “But they were not embarrassed and were not conflicted about being gay. Times have changed enough that ‘Maurice’ can be made into a movie and Cadmus’s nude male artworks can be appreciated in galleries.”

Both Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Keith say “Parade” ranks as one of Williams’s solid one-act creations. “I am looking forward to seeing what the actors would do with it,” Mr. Keith said. “In a letter to Elia Kazan dated June 16, 1950, Williams wrote, ‘The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays, some of which are like firecrackers in a rope.’ ”

Mr. Keith added, “When it comes to the number of one-acts, I think Williams is only rivaled by G. B. Shaw.”

Randy Gener, a New York-based writer and critic, is the senior editor of American Theater magazine.

Correction: Oct. 1, 2006

Because of an editing error, an article last Sunday about Tennessee Williams and his play “The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer,” which examines his relationship with Kip Kiernan, misspelled the given name of the Russian dancer whom the playwright thought Kiernan resembled. He was Vaslav Nijinsky, not Vasla.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR7 of the New York edition with the headline: Suddenly That Summer, Out of the Closet. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe